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I’m enjoying capturing images of iconic architecture and creating 3D models using photogrammetry. This is a screencast video of a model I created of an old abandoned grain silo in San Francisco using a DJI Mavic Pro and DroneDeploy. DroneDeploy makes it easy to create missions to capture images, created 2D maps and 3D models using drones.

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I was back on the east coast for the holidays visiting family and friends. I brought the new DJI Mavic Pro with me (fantastic little drone btw, best one yet) while visiting Richmond, Virginia. The mighty James River runs through this historic city, a perfect place for capturing some aerials. This short aerial film was shot during the closing days of 2016 during an especially magical golden hour.

Anyone who has grown up in the Radio Shack era of electronics will instantly recognize Forrest Mims’ hand lettered book, Getting Started in Electronics. Star took three of Mims’ popular designs and is bringing them to life as electronic kits with Mims’ circuit diagrams rendered as lovely, functional circuit boards.

Star approached us to create the campaign video for her project, which we were extremely excited to take on. Not only is this such a cool project, but it gave us the opportunity to come up with creative ways to present Star and her work in the video. The design of the circuit boards, Mims’ books and the workbench setting all lent themselves to visually rich possibilities. Have a look at the video and see if you agree.

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Take a 3 minute tour of the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest container shipping terminal in the US. Things to see: Big cranes! Big ships! Lots of containers! Be sure to click the gear icon to watch in full 4K glory.

Built my first quadcopter in April and participated in the Game of Drones – Aerial Action Sports League competitions at the Bay Area Maker Faire in May. Didn’t win any battles, but did hang out in the net a good bit.

First Drone Build: Von Drone California Special

Presented at dorkbotSF about my drone build and Game of Drones Maker Faire experience.

Shot a few dronies with friends using the 3D Robotics IRIS and a new DJI Phantom 2 Vision+.

Invited to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp where I hosted a session on drones with fellow drone pilot friend Chris Poole.

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I’ve been a long-time supporter of Creative Commons content licensing, which facilitates the proliferation of art and culture through sharing. On Flickr, I license the majority of my photos CC BY-NC-SA. It’s a good implementation and I’m happy to support people using my stuff non-commercially as I have other artists’ works.

Not so on YouTube. I recently came across this opportunistic individual who took my drone video of Burning Man 2013 and reposted it in its entirety to YouTube under the inaccurate and misleading title “Drone’s Eye View of Burning Man 2014.” A few issues here.

1. It’s not a video from 2014. This guy just reposted my 2013 video using a very SEO friendly title, as apparently a lot of people are searching for Burning Man 2014 drone videos. Google is happy to send people his way.

2. He’s monetized my video, I have not. I explicitly chose not to monetize the video as I was abiding by Burning Man’s noncommercial ethos. At almost 100k views, this guy is surely profiting.

3. There’s not much I can do about it.

The reason I can’t do anything about is I originally licensed my video CC BY, YouTube’s only Creative Commons license option. CC BY means that a user can do whatever they want with it, just as long as they give proper attribution to the creator (more on that later). Commercial use is allowed, which YouTube makes very easy by letting the resulting video be monetized with ads. Combine that with an SEO friendly, yet inaccurate and misleading title, and PROFIT!

I never expected that someone would repost the video in its entirety and monetize tons of views from it, or that YouTube would make this so easy.

The intention of CC licenses, as I’ve always believed, is to grease the wheels of culture. To create a repository of creative work that can be drawn upon to make new creative works. There are a handful of different Creative Commons license options that allow a creator to decide how they wish their works to be used. I generally go with CC BY-NC-SA which stands for “By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike.” By using this license I’m stating that you are welcome to use my works non-commercially in your own work as long as you properly attribute it to me and share the resulting work in the same manner. If you want to use my works commercially, you are welcome to contact me and see if I’m open to a deal. Otherwise, there is no need to get my permission as long as you adhere to these terms.

The real issue is YouTube’s remix tool is horribly broken. Of the 68 videos that users have “remixed” from my video, 36 are wholesale reposts of my entire video (many of which are monetized with ads). 28 are by accounts that have since been deleted by YouTube for various TOS violations and a whopping THREE are actual original new works in which a sample of my video appears.

How YouTube fulfills CC’s attribution requirement is also broken. CC BY license stipulates, “If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material.” To find this info on YouTube, you must go a video’s landing page and first click the “SHOW MORE” text in the description below the video. Here the Creative Commons Attribution license with link is clearly displayed. Below this, there’s a “View attributions” link which needs to be clicked to discover the original author’s credit and source video link. There’s no way the average YouTube user is going to go through these steps to learn what they are viewing was partially or wholly created by someone else.

It’s really unfortunate that YouTube doesn’t offer different flavors of CC licenses like Flickr has been doing for years. Had BY NC been an option, monetization could be prevented. I guess it’s not in YouTube’s interest to offer video hosting for videos that can never be monetized.

As long as YouTube’s CC implementation is broken, I will not participate in it. I’ve rolled back the CC licenses on 35 of my videos to YouTube’s Standard license. Not ideal, but at least I have some recourse if someone now tries to profit from my videos.

It’s a real bummer as Creative Commons is a great resource for source material for making art and furthering remix culture. I really hope YouTube cares enough to get it right.

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2013 has been quite the year for the proliferation of flying robots with high definition cameras. For less than $1000, it’s now possible to put together your own stabilized flying camera rig. This has resulted in many early adopters going down the rabbit hole, like I have, in building or acquiring their own rigs. Here are ten of my favorite videos shot from the drone’s perspective in 2013.

I’ll start off with the OGs of the FPV (first person view) UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) scene, Team BlackSheep’s own 2013 retrospective video of their work. Team BlackSheep is a European based collective of “R/C daredevil” hackers and pilots. These guys specialize in building and flying multirotor and fixed-wing RC aircraft. TBS has been very active this past year, capturing epic footage all over the world as is obvious in their retrospective. One of my favorites in this montage, is the renegade Costa Concordia wrecked cruise ship flyover.

Over the summer, police tried to supress a demonstration at Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey. This is the first aerial riot footage I can remember seeing from a drone and it’s an amazing point of view. Riot police with water canons and tear gas take on the demonstrators. Also notable is that the Phantom used to capture this footage, was eventually shot down by police. You can see that perspective as well.

Here’s one vision of a dystopian drone future.

Pal and fellow Phantom owner Nate Bolt, got permission to fly his rig inside the historic New York Public Library in NYC. Such classic. So spacious. Wow.

A top 10 list isn’t complete without a Burning Man video. This one by Ziv captures the morning light nicely as Truth in Beauty awakens.

You’ve likely seen this one already. This is an example of what happens when bad piloting and weddings mix. Don’t be this guy.

This Niagara Falls video is pretty epic. It got me super interested in the possibilities.

Morning at the Santa Monica pier. I love the precision of this pilot’s chosen flight path. He has balls.

This video by my pal Nate is what finally got me to pull the trigger and invest in my first flying robot. It’s short, simple and poetic. Also, slo-mo. Who doesn’t love good slo-mo?

If you like these, I’ve got a YouTube playlist going of aerial favorites as I discover them. Feel free to subscribe and follow along. Happy New Year and may your 2014 be filled with peaceful, unarmed, non-surveillance drones!